The estimate covers well-specified tasks; METR's judgment that AI drives most of the acceleration rests partly on redacted evidence.

Anthropic's AI models were likely improving on tasks with clear success criteria roughly twice as fast in October 2026 as they did between March 2024 and October 2025, according to a Nov. 5 assessment by METR, an independent model-evaluation group.

METR judges that AI assistance probably accounts for most of the recent acceleration. But Anthropic redacted much of the evidence behind that judgment, leaving outsiders with a clearer view of the faster benchmark trend than of what caused it.

The central published measurement uses AECI, Anthropic's version of the Epoch Capabilities Index. METR estimated that AECI's fitted growth rate after October 2025 was 1.9 times its earlier rate, with a 95% confidence interval of 1.5 to 2.8 times. The analysis includes snapshots of unreleased models, so it covers more than the products customers could access.

METR interprets that trend as roughly two years of historical benchmark progress achieved in the past year. The 1.9-times fit is distinct from its broader judgment of roughly twice the historical pace on well-specified tasks. That judgment carries substantial uncertainty, including whether the same acceleration extends to broader work.

Those limits matter because success on clean, easily graded tasks may translate unevenly into real-world usefulness. METR also cautions that an unusually slow historical baseline could make the acceleration appear larger. In the other direction, model results arrive after training, potentially concealing a more recent change in research speed.

Source link